“I said: ‘What? What? What, what what? What d’you mean? What are you saying?’” On a rainy bank holiday in Oxford, anorak zipped up to his chin, Andy Bell is recalling the moment that Ride broke up.

1996, shortly before the release of their fourth album, Tarantula, and the band had convened for a meeting at their manager’s house, to discuss promotional duties and business decisions and to sign a raft of paperwork. Only unexpectedly, Ride’s singer, Mark Gardener, refused to sign anything at all. “And then it just came out,” Bell continues, “that he’d got another contract, got a manager, got a band, was leaving England to go to New York. It was over, within two minutes.”

Ride had formed in Oxford in 1988, made up of four close friends – Bell, Gardener, drummer Laurence “Loz” Colbert and bassist Steve Queralt, their music characterised by its melodic, distorted wall of sound, a style that would (to their disgruntlement at the time) be labelled shoegaze. Their ascent was rapid: a handful of live shows, before they toured with baggy also-rans the Soup Dragons, and signed to the pre-Oasis Creation records in 1989. There was critical acclaim, Peel sessions, top 10 singles and world tours. They released the albums Nowhere in 1990, Going Blank Again in 1992, and Carnival of Light in 1994, before the ill-fated Tarantula and their subsequent demise.

This afternoon, we are backstage at Oxford’s O2 Academy on Cowley Road, a venue that, in a previous incarnation, was the scene of some of Ride’s early shows. Today, it is where the band are rehearsing ahead of their first performance in 20 years, a small warm-up ahead of a rush of bigger events to come: the Coachella, Primavera and Field Day festivals, and a string of dates through the UK, Europe and the US. In a time of great reunions, theirs has been one of the most dearly anticipated.

Ride announced their return last November with a press release that contained two quotations – the first, from David Crosby: “Your first band is like your first love; you never forget it, and you never quite feel the same way about any other band.” The second came more unexpectedly from the French economist Jacques Attali: “In noise can be read the codes of life, the relations among men. Clamour, melody, dissonance, harmony; when it is fashioned by man with specific tools, when it invades man’s time, when it becomes sound, noise is the source of the purpose and power, of the dream – music.” In Ride’s case, the clamour began in Banbury Technical College in 1988. Here, Gardener and Bell, already close school friends, met Colbert, and together with Queralt, another former schoolfriend, they decided to form a band.

They were, Queralt recalls, “obsessed with music – listening to it, playing it, buying guitars, it was 100% music”. Then a singles buyer at the local branch of Our Price, he kept the band supplied with the latest releases. “We were very well researched,” says Bell. “Everyone talks about our influences as the Valentines, House of Love, Loop, Spacemen 3, but it was also the Darling Buds and the Flatmates and Felt and Cocteau Twins and the first couple of Sonic Youth albums. Everything John Peel played, and the Wedding Present were one of our favourites. There were a lot of ingredients to it.”

And it was also fed by art. “The art movement we connected to was some kinds of expressionist art,” explains Colbert. They liked Rothko, he says, “for the bleak, oddly warm, existential simplicity that could be ‘nowhere’”. And Pollock “for the action paintings, getting it out, for the irreverence for past techniques or forms”. In De Kooning’s work they saw “the idea that expressionists were working to get something down first as they see or feel it, and, if necessary, think later. Also they weren’t afraid to abstract. Noise is abstract.”

For Gardener, music soon began to take precedence over visual art. “But the beautiful thing about our college was that the tutors could see the music was becoming pretty serious, and they were the first ones to say: ‘Well guys it’s not really on the syllabus, but you’ve found your art, and this is a great thing.’” They played a couple of live shows: an end of term gig at the college, after which one of their friends assured them they had sounded “absolutely terrible”, and then a warm-up slot at the Jericho Tavern. “The overwhelming feeling was one of terror,” recalls Gardener.

“And the way we dealt with it was just to play more furiously, to turn everything up,” adds Colbert. “You just had to create a wash of noise and suddenly you weren’t afraid any more.”

Their manager sent a demo to a contact at Warner Bros, and it was then a mere matter of weeks before record companies were “coming to take us out to eat, wanting to sign us,” Gardener remembers.

All four members speak of the determined speed of their rise. “The first gig was like the big bang, I think, and then the universe started to expand,” is how Colbert puts it. “I don’t even know if we had time to think about failure. It was just all moving so quickly, and it really felt like a great wave that carried us forward. So we were always heading for the void, we were just hurtling towards something, but we didn’t know what it was. And it probably wasn’t until a few years later when we had to record another album, and we were worried about the reception to that, when we suddenly thought: ‘What if people don’t like it?’ That had never occurred to us before.”

Ride in 1993. Photograph: Kevin Cummins/Getty Images

That album was the band’s third: Carnival of Light, a record made entirely differently to its predecessors that would be the beginning of their undoing. “By the third album,” Bell recalls, “we were kind of living out all our fantasies: ‘What if we just went to the Manor [the legendary Oxfordshire recording studio] for a month and jumped in the lake? Get me John Leckie! Bring me a throne!’ We were in that moment of going imperial.”

At one point, he remembers, the band went to LA, ostensibly to develop the album further, “but while we were there we had a week-long party with Primal Scream … that was when all the rock’n’roll stuff started to come into it. And that wasn’t there in the beginning. It was when making an album became a thing that you do to make stories you can tell later, rather than, you know, just working on music.”

“It was also the start of the point where Andy and Mark would arrive in the studio with almost fully formed songs,” Queralt adds. The first two albums had been written together as a band – in bedrooms and rehearsal spaces, on the road and in soundchecks. “On the first two albums I wasn’t thinking about how the bass and drums should go,” Bell remembers. “I thought everyone can do what they want. But later on, as we jettisoned all the earlier influences and started being a classic rock band, I was visualising something else. I think both me and Mark were guilty of that.”

Yet Gardener and Bell were also having creative differences; differences that grew so severe they decided that the only way to resolve them was to keep their songs far apart, each taking a separate side of the album. Bell smiles about it now, and looks a little sheepish. “That was just an argument that was settled in the most childish way possible,” he says.

The New Year’s Eve before they recorded Tarantula, Gardener held a party. “Sort of like a mini-rave,” remembers Bell. “All of our mates from Oxford were there, and the mood then was great, because we were going into the studio on 2 January, and we thought: ‘This is going to be amazing.’”

Two days later they reconvened. “But we went into the studio and just … sometimes it’s just not there,” says Bell. “You can have the four people there, all their instruments in tune, the songs are good enough, but then that extra thing isn’t there.”

It was a while before he realised it, he says; he didn’t really stop to analyse the record until Gardener had quit the band. “I think I thought it was a great album until the band had broken up and then you look round and go: ‘Let’s just listen to this album now.’ And all those things that have gone into the grooves when you made it became really obvious.”

When a rock band splits, the most difficult adjustment comes in simply returning to normal life: Colbert has described the sensation as lying somewhere between returning from the army and entering retirement. “I came out from the meeting, and I basically was in shock,” remembers Bell. “I genuinely didn’t see it coming at all, even though things weren’t that great, it was still like, ‘Fucking hell, shit, that’s it, it’s over. I’m all washed up at 25.’” Convinced he would now have to find a regular job, his first decision was to take driving lessons. “And then I saw sense and started writing songs and formed a new band.” Bell led Hurricane #1 before becoming the bassist for Oasis, and later guitarist for Beady Eye.

Andy Bell and Mark Gardener. Photograph: Kevin Cummins/Getty Images

Queralt meanwhile settled into domesticity in London. “I became a sort of house-husband, looking after my son, who was still very, very young,” he says. “And that took up the next couple of years and then it was time to get a job.” Back in Oxford, his parents quietly took down the gold disc they had kept on the wall and placed it in the loft.

Colbert decided to pursue a drumming career, and would go on to play for the reformed Jesus and Mary Chain and Gaz Coombes, but in the band’s immediate aftermath he found he began to question his method of playing and embarked upon a year of studying percussion and music theory. “Then I needed time to think, so I went out to France for five or six months, with a practice kit and spent eight hours a day just to get right in deep into all of the styles and ways of playing.”

By coincidence, Gardener had also relocated to France at that time, building a studio in a barn with the intention of working on his own music and producing others’. The move was, he concedes, an attempt to run away from his life in the UK. “This was post-Ride, post [his next band] Animalhouse, and I was utterly drained by it all. My house had become a nightclub. I went to go and get psychotherapy and all that, but really my therapy was going to the barn in France, cutting back all the nettles with a scythe, listening to Hans Zimmer, and revealing the land. It did me a lot of good.”

“You can end up hating music,” adds Colbert. “This is the thing I think we all came out of the band with: the feeling of ‘I can’t bear music any more.’” But Colbert’s passion for music also returned during his time in France. “I bought an iPod, and I used to go for walks in the vineyards, watching the seasons change, listening to Sibelius, and it was just absolutely rejuvenating. It brought me back to being OK. Music is amazing, it’s a really powerful thing, and you come back into it and it’s almost like it’s purifying. You’re emerging with a love for all this great art.” Despite their differences, the four managed to remain good friends over the intervening 20 years, Gardener and Bell, in particular, willing to own up to their parts in the split, and all of them able to see that they had been through something quite extraordinary together. “We sort of grew up together on tourbuses for those eight years,” says Colbert.

Occasionally, they have met up in person. Colbert and Gardener played music together and, at one point, took to sparring with each other once a week at taekwondo. “It was probably quite a good thing,” says Colbert. “More bands should do that: put the pads on and beat the shit out of each other for a little while. Just make sure you have a safe word.”

Around once a year they would meet to discuss lingering band business – Dave Newton, their manager, running financial matters and other offers past the four members. Each time, the prospect of a reunion was raised, but it was only three years ago that it began to seem like a genuine prospect.

“I’d started to feel there was unfinished business,” says Gardener. “This feeling started to come stronger and stronger. And maybe there were certain things that triggered that, family deaths, things that make you realise that time isn’t for ever, and you don’t want to get to a certain point in your life and think: ‘Why didn’t that happen?’”

Bell found inspiration in the Stone Roses’ reunion shows: “It was just pure joy, hearing the songs I never thought I’d hear again,” he says. When Beady Eye announced their split last year, a Ride reunion suddenly seemed viable.

Now, says Queralt, “it’s suddenly become very real. Going out there today, seeing the stage set up, all of a sudden I feel very nervous, very anxious.” For him, perhaps even more than the others, the Ride reunion means something life-changing; he has, after all, quit his nine-to-five job to rejoin the band. “For me personally it’s been 20-odd years since I was onstage,” he says, looking both thrilled and a little queasy.

For Gardener, there is the sheer joy of playing alongside his friends again. “Last year, when we were talking, we all chose the Going Blank Again time as when we were all really enjoying it, all really together, and that was the feeling we wanted to feed from and get back to that way of working. Especially if, in the future, there’s going to be more recording, then that’s the way we want to do it, to recreate that and work like that again.”

After years of playing for other bands, Colbert is eager to play Ride songs again. “They were songs about our lives,” he says, “they were so personal. And so for most of the time with Ride, it wasn’t that easy going onstage; it was you going onstage with your life. I don’t know how different it’s going to be this time around, but it’s going to be incredibly intense. Because it’s not just going out and playing some music for a crowd. It’s the four of us. It’s us again.”